Indie Author S.L. Madden

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Back Matter

As I work on getting rid of those final few formatting issues (you’d think I would have learned by now how to stop them from popping up), I’m putting the finishing touches on the overall look of the product. I think I may have finally settled on a cover (to be revealed shortly, along with a release date), but I’m still up in the air about the blurb, the back matter. Honestly, it’s one of my least favorite parts of the writing process, but I know it has to be done.

In order to see how it looks, I came up with a quick and dirty version, something that pertains to the story, but was designed to be more of a placeholder. When I tried to go in and tweak it here and there, I found I couldn’t come up with anything much better, even though I wasn’t terribly happy with it. It is as follows:

When Allison Bramer awakens on a beach with fractured memories of how she arrived there, her fight for survival begins. Battling the elements, she fears the isolated location may be the death of her.

Her excitement at discovering she’s not alone gives into terror when she realizes she has no idea what the strangers’ intentions are. Soon, she learns there are some things better left unseen.

Book two of the Unseen Things trilogy.

It does the job, explaining to the potential reader without hopefully giving too much away (although, sorry to everyone who didn’t know this book wasn’t about Thomas. Oops.).

But then another idea came to me. This one is a little more generic, as I can put it on the back of every book in the series. Only the bottom two lines will change, to better represent who the book is about. I came up with a rough version of it this morning:

There are creatures all around us, hidden in the shadows.

Unseen things.

We might glance them out of the corner of our eye, but we convince ourselves it was merely a trick of the light. There are those who can see them, who have stared directly into their blinding white eyes.

They are our only hope.

This is a tale of survival and self-discovery.

This is Allison’s story.

For instance, book three might read:

This is a tale of power and revenge.

This is _____’s and _______’s story.

Yeah, I’m not giving that away quite yet. 🙂

I think I rather like the second, more generic, option, but I’m putting it out there. What do you think? Do you prefer the first blurb, the one more tailored to the individual book, or do you like the second one, that talks more about the series? And please, if you have any suggestions to strengthen either one, please feel free to let me know. By no means is this verbiage set in stone.